tter poke off
to bed?"

He did not answer her, but went to the window, put his hands to his face
and peered out. Then he turned, stood a moment looking about the room as
if for some suggestion of refuge, went to the couch, and lay down. Tira
stood for a moment considering. Almost at once, he was asleep. She threw
a shawl over him and went into the bedroom and stretched herself as she
was on the bed.

XL

Raven, to his sorry amusement, discovered something. It was Milly, and
she had changed. Indubitably Milly regarded him with a mixture of wonder
and of awe. He had taken command of the situation in the house and
developed it rationally. The house itself had become a converging point
for all medical science could do for a man hit in a vital spot and
having little chance of recovery. But what Raven knew to be the common
sense of the measures he brought to pass, Milly, in her wildness of
anxiety, looked upon as the miracles of genius. She even conciliated
him, as the poor human conciliates his god. She brought him the burnt
offering of her expressed belief, her humility of admiration. And
whenever one of the family was allowed to supplement the nurses, by day
or night, she effaced herself in favor of Raven or Nan. Raven was the
magician who knew where healing lay. Nan was warmth and coolness, air
and light. Dick's eyes followed Nan and she answered them, comforting,
sustaining him, Raven and Milly fully believed, in his hold on earth.
But as to Milly, Raven had to keep on wondering over her as she wondered
at him. So implicit had been his belief in her acquired equipment for
applying accepted remedies to the mischances of life, that he was amazed
at seeing her devastated, overthrown. She was even less calm than the
women he remembered here in this country neighborhood. When sickness
entered their homes, they were, for the most part, models of efficient
calm. They had reserves of energy. He wondered if Milly had crumbled so
because she had not only to act but to decide how to seem to act. She
had to keep up the wearisome routine of fitting her feelings to her
behavior, her behavior to her feelings. There were not only things to be
done; there were also the social standards of what ought, in crises, to
be felt. She had to satisfy her gods. And she simply wasn't strong
enough. Her hold was broken. She knew it, clutched at him and hung on
him, a dead weight, while he buoyed her up. Were they all, he wondered,
victim